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When asked in an interview about his tendency to write novels that are set in the past, Caryl Phillips explained that he is “deeply committed to the notion of ‘history’ being the fundamental window through which we have to peer in order to see ourselves clearly”. In his novel Cambridge (1991), he explores the foundations of our postmodern world through the window of past discourses, in this way offering present-day readers his own insights into the experience of cross-cultural encounter and the management of human otherness. By re-activating two opposed discourses from the nineteenth-century, one that resisted cultural exchange by dividing the world into “us” and “them”, and one that pursued a sense of belongingness, he can be seen as presenting postmodern readers with a dichotomy which affected the conceptualization of ethnic otherness in the past, and as challenging them to re-assess today’s discourses on the same topic. In the world of socalled globalization, are there still those who think in terms of an “us” and a “them”? Or can at least the readers of a postmodern novel form some kind of community that is not only large but non-hegemonic? My suggestion will be that Phillips, by encouraging his readers to relate to the intertextualities and multi-voicedness of past kinds of writing, is engaging in a new kind of literary community-making precisely by drawing on the “discontinuities, alternatives, and contradictions” of cultural memory.

Caryl Phillips’s <i>Cambridge</i>: Discourses in the Past and Readers in the Present